We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord. And we pray that our unity will one day be restored. And they’ll know we are…
Best be prepared: The antidisestablishmentarians are coming for our consciences!
Remember the word we often heard at elementary school spelling bees — “antidisestablishmentarianism” — said to be the longest word in the English language? Well, it isn’t, not anymore. That honor now belongs to “acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene,” defined as “a tough rigid…
Primitive Baptist Universalists? Are you kidding?
In the year 1741 at the Congregational Church in Enfield, Conn., Jonathan Edwards, pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Mass., declared: The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some…
Expelling dissent: America from Roger Williams to the ‘Tennessee Three’
On March 29 in the year of our Lord(?) 2023, hundreds of young people, many of junior and senior high school age, descended on the Tennessee state house in Nashville to demand government action to reduce the threat of school…
Holy Week 2023: When Golgotha came too early
For me, Palm Sunday didn’t work this year. In the liturgical calendar, Palm Sunday introduces Holy Week, a momentarily joyous prelude to the agony of Golgotha. Palm Sunday is supposed to give us hope that will strengthen us to walk…
Troubling the water, a gospel for the ‘unmet’
These days, I can’t get this Gospel text out of my head: Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. One man was…
Revivals? Well, since you asked …
In the introduction to his classic work, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, published in 1738, Jonathan Edwards, pastor of the Congregational Church in Northampton, Mass., described the behavior of the town youth prior to the awakening…
Slavery and guns in America: The constitutional parallels
“We don’t have to die like this. We don’t have to live like this.” Those two sentences have become something of a mantra for Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. I heard her say…
Biblical orthodoxy 2023: Sign or get ‘churched’
In Giving Glory to God in Appalachia: Worship Practices of Six Baptist Subdenominations, the late Appalachian State University professor Howard Dargan observed: One ceases to be a member of a local Primitive (Baptist) church by being dismissed by letter to…